The Shell station we slept at was at an intersection right off route 81 in Clear Brook, Virginia. There was an Amazon distribution center a block away from us. I think all the Amazon employees have put fart cannons on their cars so when they leave work their boss can hear them driving all the way home! There was a lot of muffler noise in the night but Pammie slept like a very tired child educator who now only had one 61-year-old child to worry about. Things would change rapidly but, for now, she was very rested.
I went into Dunkies next door and got us a couple coffees and a couple of gut bombs and then I got to work on a graphics project and then did a saxophone lesson.
While I was working Pam pulled her bike off the bike rack – which was on the inside between my bike and the camper. How she did it, I’ll never know but it was not easy, for sure!
School’s out for eval… 
Bike lane bliss 
The Amazon bistro center off the bike path.
When she came back from her ride, she pulled a chair out of the cargo hold and sat up on a little hill behind the camper to get some shade and check in on the digital realm. Before long she came in and showed me the Facebook post from the “Friends of Cross Lake”. RUBY HAD BEEN FOUND! So much for relaxation! The crisis of today has been revealed and it is time to rise to the occasion.
Happy camper… 
A seat in the shade
This is good news and a tragedy all rolled into one. WTF do we do now? We knew Rubes was, and is, a survivor. We knew our Cross Lake family had much more on their hands than a visiting stray cat who decided to stray again. We really didn’t want them to have to deal with her but the person that found her couldn’t keep her and was either going to take her back to the Hale’s or to the SPCA.
I’ve said many derogatory things about Ruby but they were all just measured declarations of love. Right?! How can you NOT love a stray cat that has destroyed every door frame and every piece of furniture in your home and spends every day turning money into disgusting litter box offerings that need to be chiseled out and thrown away every two days? Petco loves her even more than I do!
Before I’m done working Pam has come up with a solution to our plight and the folks in the county are fighting over the opportunity to have their homes ruined by our orphaned kitty.
Today is going to be a rest day. We’re headed for the Lazy A campground and I can hardly wait. We gas up at our host’s while Pam works on the remedy to Ruby’s plight.
We drive over some windy roads, under a bridge of questionable height and lo and behold, wind up at Lazy A Campground which, at first, looks to be in the back yard of a housing development but turns out to be quite nice. Quiet, very lightly populated and beautiful! I’ll let the pics speak for themselves.
There is a creek at the Lazy A campground. We rode our bikes all the way down the field road and came to an embankment where you could jump into a nice deep pool…if you wanted to. Someone had also rigged up a rope swing with a pair of bike handlebars tied to some nylon rope. We took a nice dip and then went back to our campsite to get the fire going.
We cooked up some burgers on the fire and then sat and watched a thunderstorm roll in over the hills. With twenty minutes or so you couldn’t even tell there were any hills there!